Gender genie

I saw this several months ago. Then, and just now, using various long excerpts from email I’ve written, I’ve mostly found it to guess my gender incorrectly. If I am being very analytical, or, perhaps, pedantic, it guesses my gender correctly as “male”. Most of my more informal correspondence it incorrectly identifies as “female”.

This isn’t what I expected, actually, since even my most informal writing tends to be a little “stilted”—that’s always been my own impression. But a lot of my more personal correspondence this algorithm identifies as strongly “female”.

I also came across somwehere recently a feedback-normalized test that incorrectly identified me as female. This is somewhat interesting to me as, for example, many years ago when I took the MMPI it supposedly indicated that I was more masculine than the average man and more feminine than the average woman. A result that pleased me, frankly.

In keeping with my old-style feminism, I was in the past strongly on the nurture side of the nature/nurture debate concerning gender differences. However, too many years of solid scientific research leads me to accept that male and female brains are significantly different. Thus, I would expect that such tools could be refined to produce a relatively high degree of accuracy. But there will always be outliers.

Well, I elided some important points. The most significant would be that male and female brains differ according to localization of language. You’re right that it’s not _necessarily_ the case that the observed differences would result in significant differences in writing, but I think it’s suggestive. That’s why I used the word “expect”.

The linked webpage now has a very large sample, and they’re getting a 70% rate of correct guessing. It’s not rigorous, of course, but I’m inclined to think that it’s doing a lot better than your “flip of the coin”. I suspect that empiricism has trumped your intuition.

Now, it should be noted that there’s no reason to assume that observed differences in writing style are necessarily inherent and not learned. My view is that brain studies and such indicate that gender differences are _also_ inherent as well as being learned.

I think, maybe, that Andrew meant that doing stuff like this on the internet is stupid. If you search his sight for The+internet+is+stupid you get 108 hits, so it’s not such a devastating insult.

it failed
it also failed

Please please look at the stats for the gender genie. You’ll find it is worse than coin-flip for female entries across the board in almost all categories. That means something is seriously wrong with the program.

It has a success rate lower than its currently advertised 70% for male entries.

In fact the only reason the rate is currently 70% is that people are feeding it nonfiction entries longer than 500 words with cues that it correctly recognizes as female – it has a pretty good rate there, but the fact that the correctly-identified-as-female submissions are an order of magnitude larger than any other category and two orders larger than some makes me think someone’s trying to make it look better than it is. (The first time I was led to the stats, it was male fiction entries, I think – I might be wrong – that led the pack, both in success rate and in quantity of submissions.)

Another reason to distrust the 70% correct statistic is that this is all self-reportage. Someone needs to do this experiment with independant verification. Anyhow, don’t trust the genie, at least for now.

I tried three times. The first time it told me I was male, but I thought well, even though the paper is about gender, it’s my required (hateful) quantitative paper. Maybe that seemed more male, even though there were not actually any numbers in the excerpt I used. Then the second time it told me I was male, even though I fed it part of a fairly fluffy ethnographic conference paper. The third time it finally said I was female, based on a pretty chatty email. But I note that the word “so” is apparently extremely girly, which means that my long-acknowledged overuse in email of that word had a major impact there.

My articles about Biochemsitry and Jesus are also apparently male. So, my only “female”
piece happens to be about a female. Notably, feminine keywords include “her”, “she”, and “hers”. I wonder if a men writing about women tend to get misread? I also wonder if men really do write about women less, and therefore it’s an effective tool for predicting gender.

That’s interesting, I was thinking the opposite. It does consider ego-words female – and I was thinking it could be right: I often do think women talk about themselves too damn much and impersonal or general subjects too damn little – and take that to be a feminist move of some sort. ‘The personal is political’ thing. Which was a good point once upon a time (yes who does the dishes is very political) but has gotten degraded into meaning ‘that means I’m supposed to drone about myself all the time.’

I’ve tried two so far: got one female and one male.

I tried three times, twice with academic writing, and once with a personal email.

In all three cases, the program guessed male: I’m a woman.

As far as I can tell, it will assume that you’re female if you write like a valley girl and/or use female pronouns a lot. If you have a moderately authoritative voice, you’re a guy.

what fun!

jo.

Of course, the reason it was ‘wrong’ about Mieville is that I assumed that ‘China’ was a woman’s name. The program’s algorithm seems to be better than mine!